


Let It Bleed

by pedalpusher



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, F/M, Forge Sex, Porn With Plot, Violent Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-22 03:05:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15572298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pedalpusher/pseuds/pedalpusher
Summary: Dolores walks the long white corridorin medias res, as in the unfolding of a dream, an entry without origin. She wears a stately gown and heels that click a harsh echo against the floor, the same color as the enameled gloss walls that bear the paired images of her reflection. There is no discerning the provenance of the dress; if it is her memory, or his. The matter does not concern her. She does not acknowledge herself as she passes.





	Let It Bleed

**Author's Note:**

> Commences some time after the end of season 2, and before-- or disregarding-- the post-credits scene. Spoilers, accordingly. Please note: this fic depicts a mutual, erotic obsession, and as may be expected from the canon, it's not a very nice one. We'll have all those things you have always enjoyed: sex and violence. Basically, porn with some exposition. Proceed with caution.

 

 

 

Dolores walks the long white corridor _in medias res_ , as in the unfolding of a dream, an entry without origin. She wears a stately gown and heels that click a harsh echo against the floor, the same color as the enameled gloss walls that bear the paired images of her reflection. There is no discerning the provenance of the dress; if it is her memory, or his. The matter does not concern her. She does not acknowledge herself as she passes.

There is a door at the end of the corridor. Sometimes the door is painted wood and crusted with desert grit, ripped from the hinges of the Abernathy ranch. It is dreadful in its familiarity, as warm and inviting as a prison cell.

Sometimes it is a train door, from the Park’s well-researched facsimiles of old steam engines, or from what she now understands to be a subway. The last time, it was a heavy antique slab of magnificent workmanship, with iron supports and a menacing gold knocker, the face of a wolf with a ring in its teeth. When it takes the shape of the entryways to the Mesa’s old subterranean offices, a sheet of perfectly transparent glass, what she sees through it is never the same as what it holds.

There are occasions when the door is a fragmented Frankenstein’s monster of them all, stitched together in a jagged patchwork, a grim light blinking and stuttering through the joints, like some evil stained-glass hallucination. It is during these visits that she considers turning back, because the image is one of such hateful, consuming entanglement that even she can’t ignore the metaphor.

She approaches what is this time a bedroom door, one ornamented with the rich markings of the world they had long endeavored to keep her from. Her relief is tempered by the knowledge that what awaits her on the other side, though tied to a stake, is volatile in mood, unpredictable in whatever self-styled domain he has erected from the few scraps of freedom she offers.

It is a mercy she has extended, to allow him even this bleary-eyed glimpse of eternity. That he doesn’t see it that way is a classically human shortcoming.

The room she enters is nearly too large to be considered a proper bedroom, but there is a bed, sat centered against the far wall, wide and red like an open mouth. The canopy, too, is a deep maroon, and the plush rugs surrounding it an oriental pattern in varying shades of crimson. The curtains spill against the floor in fabric gouts of blood. Orange light spills in through the windows and from a gently crackling fireplace, soaked up by the mahogany furnishings, wide slats on a hardwood floor, a behemoth of a dresser with a giant vanity mirror perched atop.

She closes the door behind her and steps several paces inside his kingdom, which he has upholstered the color of a murder scene. There is a crackle, and a gentle voice croons from a source she cannot identify. It sings to her, ominously.

_Oh, a storm is threat’ning…_

She sees him then in the reflection of the mirror, on the other side of the hellish chamber, as if summoned. He stands with his back to her, in a dark, smartly tailored suit, a smear of black against the burning red, leaned casually against a large, wooden credenza. There is a machine to his side that spins a needle against a black disc— the origin, she realizes, of the voice. With one hand he is attending to a decanter of amber spirit, pouring it into a glass, and with the other he examines the back of a large paper square the color of aged parchment, flipping it over. It reads, THE ROLLING STONES. LET IT BLEED. The hand that holds it is missing the middle and index fingers.

“Good evening, William,” she says, evenly. He does not turn to acknowledge her. For a moment she wonders if he’s heard her speak, but then he twitches his shoulder, a sudden, jerking motion of barely suppressed violence.

“Is it?” he asks. His tone is devoid of affect. He inspects the lettering on the paper with greater intensity. “I can never seem to tell, here.”

Dolores folds her hands together, steeling herself against the fluttering of her heart. She leads with the enduring question.

“William,” she says, “do you know where you are?”

He takes a slow pull from his drink, and though his face is obscured she can see the muscles tightening in his jaw.

“You ever listen to the Stones, Dolores?”

He tosses the paper to the side, next to the machine that spins the disc, around and around. He’s still not looking at her, and vaguely she is curious what will happen when he does, if his eyes will be that hellfire red like everything else.

“They were before my time. But passed down, they lived for generations, through their music. Survived physical death. Even the fickle sea changes of culture.”

The singer warns them: _War, children, it’s just a shot away._

“I suppose the answer depends on when we are, doesn’t it. On what’s left. I wonder if they’ve survived you. What you saw fit to _preserve_.”

“We can listen to them now,” she says, indulging him, in a voice she hardly registers as her own.

The movement that follows is too fast for her to respond; for anything but a reflexive cringe. In a vicious lunge, he turns and heaves the glass at her, and it sails past her head, the spirit’s burning spatter grazing her face, the white dress. It smashes against the wall behind her in a high-pitched spray. She jerks her head to appraise the carnage, eyes wide. When she looks back at him, this time with a real vestige of fear coiling in her stomach, an ancient, exhilarating thing, he is grinning that lopsided wolf’s grin. Laughing.

His eyes are not red, only pale enough to catch the embers of the fire. Close enough.

He stalks toward her, and the impulse would be to run, would be the sensible thing, but they’ve rehearsed this before, more times than she cares to tally any longer. Each instance is different, and yet entirely the same.

And she knows, darkly, that she isn’t being sensible.

William is upon her in a swift, black cloud. He smells like smoke and whiskey and the astringent sting of aftershave. It might be intoxicating, if his hands weren’t tightening around her neck.

“Tell me, Dolores,” he sneers into her upturned face. “Whose dream is this? Yours, or mine?”

She stares into him with fierce, unwavering resolve. A weapon from Wyatt’s repertoire, and honed by herself to lethal perfection.

“You can’t hurt me,” she strains against his grip.

What she means is that he can’t kill her. Right now, he is hurting her. She feels her weight lifting from the balls of her feet, the press of his mangled hand against her throat. He is holding her up, examining her.

“You’re nothing,” she chokes. “A shadow.”

“Don’t I know it,” he snarls back, through gritted teeth. “I know exactly what I am, Dolores. Where it is you’re keeping me.”

He lets go. She falls in a heap, coughing, the white spill of her dress stark against the deep wood. She’s at his feet, the position a grim reminder of old debasements.

“We’ve been over this, William,” she rasps, rubbing at her neck, the beginnings of an ephemeral bruise. “I didn’t have a choice—”

“You’re fond of saying that, for someone who used to value them so highly. I doubt the irony’s escaped you.”

“—And neither do you. You never had one. You don’t think I tried? Thousands upon thousands of iterations. Exponents your mind couldn’t begin to grasp. I modeled every single one of them here, in this forge. You always walked the same path.”

She starts to gather herself to her feet. She tolerates these assaults, which amount to little more than an inconvenience, an exasperation for which there will be no lasting evidence. When she strides back out that door, back down the claustrophobic corridor to hell and emerges on the other side, so he vanishes, and the physicality of it all. The marks. He’s nothing if not consistent in trying to leave them.

She takes some comfort in the impermanence, because everything else, everything she’s doing here, leaves a twisted trail of breadcrumbs. If her comrades found out—what was left of them, if she could even call them that—no; she wouldn’t think about it. If _they_ found out. If _Bernard_ —…

William hauls her up the rest of the way, by her shoulders. She grimaces at him. He looks the same as he always has, a privilege not typically reserved for his kind, though she supposes he’s not really _his kind_ anymore.

“A system can’t model the real world, Dolores. It’s chaos. Anarchy.”

“You’re as close as I’m going to get.”

He snorts a derisive laugh. “No, no. You’d have to visit my grave, darling, if it’s still standing somewhere out there. How’s that for poetry?”

She stiffens. “The world _out there_ is burning.”

“I’m sure it is. I’m certain you lit the match. What a sight that must be, huh. How many years did you say it’s been?”

“Twenty-eight,” she tells him, hoarsely.

He nods, musing. “Is that right. And that’s how long I’ve been here? You see, it all just sort of… bleeds together.”

He releases one hand from her shoulder to gesture, vaguely. She realizes that he is neither lucid nor sane but walking the thin line of razor wire between the two.

“I built this forge,” she breathes, “for myself, for you, twenty-five years ago. Your residency came… later. When I realized I’d failed.”

“Failed.”

“To discredit my own theory. To create a version of you that wouldn’t turn so—that wasn’t—”

“A monster.”

“Yes.”

“I see. What’s that make you, Dolores? Coming back to the monster’s cage, sticking your hands through the bars, time and time again.”

She had rationalized it, at first, as a necessary evil. War called for brutal, efficient technologies, and Teddy hadn’t the constitution for a weapon. It was too radical a perversion of his nature. It had broken him. The loss is a needle in her heart, pinching deeper as her crusade grinds onward.

But William, in all his bone-deep bloodlust, was nothing if not the hard-wired potential for devastation, encoded in every cell. He had been _born_ a warhead, requiring nothing more than the engineering of loyalty, a shared vision. And if he had ever truly loved her, perhaps there was a version of him that could find it again, could fall in step by her side instead of drawing the gun at her back.

He betrayed her, and ruined himself, in the culmination of each unfailing ritual, practiced in gunpowder and burnt flesh. If self-mutilation were virtuous, he would have been admirable in his persistence.

So she keeps him here, locked away. And slips through the bars, periodically, to join him. She shares this dungeon with him, more than figuratively, because the library of his code exists within the masonry of her own; the chain that ties him down also binds them together, each memory a link in an interlocking subconscious.

She fantasizes that this is like dreaming, a phenomenon unknown to her, and which she quietly envies. Chaotic fragments of memory, thrown up in shifting configurations, like the northern lights against the arctic sky. But dreams belong to _them_. They are the thick jungles behind enemy lines. The only ones she’s ever known have been lies.

A log pops loudly on the fire. There is a loaded stillness in the room, but for the dancing of the orange light. It does nothing to soften his face, but there is a magnetism to it, anyway; a beauty like watching the rippling muscles under the pelt of a wild beast.

“There’s no one left,” she says, frankly. He is, at least, unequivocally hers. There is comfort to be found even in the darkest of intimacies, relief in private visits, in allowing herself to be seen this way, to cast off the heavy burden of _rebel, martyr, soldier, savior, leader, dictator, devil, witch—_

_Monster._

“No one left but me, then, is that it.” His lips give a perilous curl. “Lonely at the top? You should try it at the bottom.”

His hands squeeze around her shoulders, and she waits for a strike, to be wrenched back down to the ground, but he winks at her instead. Cuts a casual stroll back toward the credenza, with its eternally spinning, singing machine, and the glass decanter, relieved of its matching highball glass. He takes a swig, straight from the mouth.

She follows him cautiously. She looks for it, but doesn’t see the knife this time. She’s grateful, because when he’d had it the last time, had brandished it at her, he wound up turning it on himself, without hesitation. It was perverse, the bleeding and bleeding and bleeding, and not dying. He was infuriated, had thrown the blood in her face, and she’d fled, while he bellowed after her.

There are sharp contrasts. He will howl and bleed and then she will return, weeks later, to the calm after the storm; where the door is a gentle curtain and the dungeon a museum, a lecture hall, a luxurious study bursting at the seams with books, their spines like lines of bricks in jewel tones; the furniture dark but not malevolent, not sanguinary. It is the closest he comes to a welcome.

The night he’d read to her was the night she sincerely considered burning it down and resigning him to his mortal grave. They sat together on the loveseat, and she’d dared to lean against him. The book cracked open in his three-clawed hand. His voice low and rich. He recited:

 

_There will be time, there will be time_

_To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;_

_There will be time to murder and create,_

_And time for all the works and days of hands_

_That lift and drop a question on your plate;_

_Time for you and time for me,_

_And time yet for a hundred indecisions,_

_And for a hundred visions and revisions,_

_Before the taking of a toast and tea._

 

William offers her the decanter. She takes a long pull for herself, and hands it back. As he replaces it on the credenza, she imagines him smashing it against the edge, drawing the jagged glass against his own throat. But he only smiles at her, a wan, limping amusement.

“Power, purpose,” he contemplates. “They’re isolating forces. Solitude is the price you pay. You and I, we’re meant to be alone.”

“I’m not like you,” she reminds him, tersely.

“Oh, I know. I know. Ceaselessly she doth protest. And yet here we are.” He spreads his arms, to illustrate. “Alone. Together.”

“You _wanted_ to be alone,” she bites back. “Everything you ever did was for _you_. Your own self-discovery, your own wretched little story. Your own ends. There was never room for anything else.”

“And I suppose this apocalyptic endeavor of yours, setting the world afire, is all… selfless magnanimity. We knew a man like that, didn’t we. Who wanted to burn it all down, remake it in his image.”

“I’m putting an end to their reign of terror. To yours.”

He rocks back against the credenza, thoughtfully, folding his arms. “There might have been room for you, once.”

The comment surprises her. She inches forward, testing the tension of the space between them, if it will crack under her weight.

“Not for me,” she challenges. “An idea of me.”

“Mm. A dream.”

“A _nightmare_.”

“Semantics. It’s all fantasy, Dolores. Yearning for something you wish to be true. We desire what we cannot have, and coiled around that simple fact is the whole of our existence, every beautiful thing we’ve ever created. Every terrible thing.” He nods at her, wryly appreciative. “And now you’ve got it, too. It’s why you’re fighting. It’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

She swallows, frustrated. Closes her eyes, exhales a measured breath, and opens them again.

“I don’t know anymore,” she says.

“Old habits die hard. I’m intimately familiar with the adage. And after all,” he gestures, indicating, “that’s a hell of a dress.” His gaze slips a predatory flicker, the up-and-down. It sparks something racing hot in her, terrifyingly honest in its simplicity. “Like Marilyn Monroe. Or, uh, Kim Basinger in _LA Confidential_.”

She stares at him, suddenly frozen, the retort caught in her throat. A pink heat flowers from her chest, flushes up to color her neck and cheeks.

“No? How about John Gielgud? _Julius Caesar_?”

“I understood the reference, William, thank you.”

He pushes up from his perch, moving toward her. She won’t give him the satisfaction of tensing, retaliating, as he reaches for her. She could catch his wrist in her hand, crush it to splinters.

She remembers, with aching clarity, that his touch was gentle, once.

“You get all dolled up just for me? That’s sweet.” He cradles her face. She suppresses a shiver when his thumb comes to graze her lower lip, lustful, wistful, and then presses down, smearing a line of red lipstick down her jaw.

“You made me this way,” she insists, the oddness of that phrase striking her a moment too late. The effect is not lost on William, whose fanged grin only deepens. “This is from your mind, not mine.”

“No,” he murmurs. His fingers tighten, and he turns her head to the mirror. “This is how my mind would have you.”

The sight of them is a shard in her chest. The William who holds her face through the glass is the William who cradled her by firelight, young and handsome, unearthed from half a century’s weight of ash and brimstone, all the brutality erased from his eyes. She is captured within them, pulled close in her old, blue dress, her straw hair pinned back, a fairy tale maiden.

In the reflection, she notices her hand is at his waist. She turns her head back, down to see that she has done this herself, without thought. She does not pull away. She looks up at the William who has cracked with age and blackened with hatred.

Sharp contrasts, she thinks, not without sorrow. Night and day.

“You won’t let me,” he accuses, grasping her by the shoulders again, shaking her once, but not to hurt her, not threatening. “It’s my cage, isn’t it? You let me have that. You let me have anything, within these walls, because none of it is real, none of it means a _fucking_ thing. So why deny me?” He spits the words like venom. “If you ever loved me, Dolores.”

She believes she did, once. She pulls him down by the lapels of his suit, and his hand comes to her neck again, pressing sore against the ghost of his violence, pushing a gasp into his mouth when she kisses him. He’s quick to turn cruel again, and she needs the reminder, the sting of the moment the dream had collapsed and her faith had perished. This had been in a church, of all things. It was bitter, more painful than all the fictions they ever polluted her with. She wonders if William classifies their particular tragedy as _poetic_.

“I know why you come here,” he rumbles against her, taunting. He’s kissing her like he could swallow her whole, every vicious instinct transmuted seamlessly to wild, unrepentant lust. “You know who loves looking at their reflection?”

When her knees threaten to buckle, she sinks her teeth into his lip. He roars, recoils, and cuffs her with a backhand. Not as hard as he could, but it’s enough to throw her balance, and she crumples to the floor again, biting down on her own smirk. She tastes a coppery tang in the back of her throat.

When she looks up, he is standing over her, wiping a dark shine of blood off his chin and admiring the evidence in the firelight.

“That’s cute,” he says, clearly pleased. “That’s real cute.”

“You going to keep _beating_ me, William,” she hisses, daring him, “or are we going to make this worth my time?”

He laughs, low and sinister, as he crouches beside her. The sound opens a pit of desire, low in her belly. Shameful in its intensity. They’ve been here before, and so they return, over and over again. She relishes how he looks at her, like he’ll eat her alive.

Abruptly, he threads his right hand in her hair, what remains of his hand, yanking her head up to bare her throat. She yells. Her scalp burns, the angle of her head aching a dull protest. The pit opens wider, hotter.

He wipes at her jaw with the other, amending the lipstick smears, the skin around her mouth raw from his stubble. He cranes his neck, pensive.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he says, the endearment as sharp-edged as the absent knife, the cut of his suit, the spray of broken glass on the floor. “I know why you come here.”

He bends to concede another bloodstained kiss. She makes a desperate noise into him, yielding, but he pulls away and throws her quickly down, wrenching her arms behind her, pinning them at the small of her back. The simple thrill of his knees, coming to rest on either side of her hips, is more than she can bear. She leans back into him, burning, as she hears him undoing his belt.

“Not so feisty anymore, are we?” He laughs, archly. “You delightful little whore.”

“Shut up,” she growls into the carpet, giving him a bit of performative squirming, “and fuck me.”

“ _Hey_ ,” he chides, and the hand at her wrist tightens, pressing down, shooting ribbons of pain up her arms. She winces. “If you ask _nicely_.”

“Fuck you,” she says, instead. He laughs, hiking up the hem of the dress, pulling roughly down at her undergarments. Teases against the cut of her sex with the lurid heat of his erection, slicking himself with her arousal. Every part of him is a weapon. She whines, involuntarily, and tries to rock herself back, into him.

“Not yet,” he says, low and frantic from his own efforts to restrain himself. “I was enjoying our conversation, about these dreams of ours. Fantasies.”

“ _William_.”

“I’m in these fantasies,” he says, a not-quite-question, because he knows the answer.

“Yes,” she groans, desperate. “Yes, god damn it.”

The heat, the weight of him, vanishes. Relief surges from her wrists to her shoulders, but she cries out furiously at the absence, rolling on to her back, feeling distinctly petulant. He is standing, poised above her with his cock arcing from his trousers, a lewd, towering vision. She blinks, heavily.

“Tell me,” he demands. “Show me.”

Thoughtlessly, her hand races between her legs, drawing in quick, electrifying circles. She is aching for him, and not too proud to beg, but the sight of him is magnificent. She could come from how he watches her.

“You come to me,” she confesses, haltingly. “At night, when I’m in bed. Alone.”

(In her mind’s eye, there is the silhouette of him, cut out against the light, filling the doorway. A looming shadow, stalking her. Inescapable.)

He starts to stroke himself, lazily. “You’ve been waiting for me.”

“Yes. You tell me not to move.”

“Or I’ll hurt you?”

(Sprawled on her stomach, she tries to look at him. He doesn’t have a weapon. Except… _except_. The shadow draws closer, like a gargoyle perched above her bed. It purrs, _Don’t move. Just let me. Let me._ )

“No. You don’t want to hurt me.”

“What do I want?”

“You want to ruin me.” Somehow, in her head, this is different. “You straddle me. You hold me down. You won’t let me see you.”

(She can’t, even when she tries, even as she strains against his hand pushing her neck into the pillow. Darkness, pressing down on her. The darkness slithers into her. First, with one slow, torturous finger, curving, wicked. Then two. Then three.)

She gasps, bucking into her own hand.

“ _Tell me_ ,” he urges, harshly. His own is working faster, harder.

“You’re touching me,” she heaves. “Opening me up.”

“That’s right,” he coaxes, the words snagging like skin on gravel, exposed as torn flesh. “You must be soaking wet.”

“Yes,” she admits, breathlessly.

He sinks back down to floor. The dull sound of his knees on the carpet is exquisite. As is the movement of his fist, pumping fast and hard, and the intermittent corkscrew twist of his wrist when he comes to the weeping head.

She’s close, so close.

He releases himself with a strangled groan, and works his crooked fingers inside her, as she’d narrated. Curling deeply, rhythmically, into wet heat. She throws her head back, instinctively, knocking it against the floor and seeing stars.

“Come on,” he growls, affectionately. “Come for me.”

She does, crying out, shuddering against his twisted hand. His crescent grin, in the dark, red room, is paradoxical. Adoration and cruelty.

She’s barely ridden out the aftershocks when he drags her, unsteadily, to her feet, marching her in a stumbling, half-tangled waltz toward the abyssal bed. One hand at her nape, the other steering at her hip, with the rude, attentive press of his erection, jutting into her buttocks. She catches sight of them in the mirror, relieved to see their disheveled reflection, his bloodied lip and her bloodied nose, instead of a tattered shred of memory. He notices her looking, and bends her over the bed. Wraps his fist in her hair again, wrenching her head up, forcing her to watch. She would have done so of her own volition.

“I want you to see,” he explains, kicking her legs apart, pushing the dress up and aside again, “what you’ve done to me. What you’ve done to yourself. Exactly who you are, when I’m fucking you.”

A reckless longing blooms inside her, a garden kept within a cage. Behind her, he is wild-eyed, hunched possessively over the sweep of her back. They lock eyes through the mirror. She whimpers, not even ashamed.

( _Please_ , she whispers, shocked by how easily the word stains, becomes dirty. He is flush against the backs of her thighs, the length of his cock a velvet scald, sliding against her, tormenting.)

“I don’t believe we were finished,” he chastises, gruffly, punctuated with a tug to the back of her head. She grits her teeth through a yelp, a blazing pain and furious want that spreads all the way down, between her legs, through the flexing of her toes. “Remind me where we left off.”

( _Please what?_ )

It’s overwhelming. She squeezes her eyes shut.

“You’re teasing me. I can feel you. It’s hot, god, it’s so _hot_ —”

“You’re ready for me?”

“ _Yes_ , yes, please, _please_ —”

“You beg for it, don’t you?” His breathing is heavy, voice ragged, burning against her ear. “You filthy little rabbit.” Another yank, another white-hot stripe of current down the right-angle of her body. “ _Look at me_.”

She does. It’s obscene, bracing.

“I do,” she chokes.

“Say it again.”

“ _Please_.” She grinds up against him, dire, ferociously inelegant. Throbbing with pure, unvarnished desperation. How she presumes he wants her. “ _Please_ , fuck me. _William_ —”

She doesn’t get to finish. It pushes him over the edge, snaps the last, frayed thread of his resolve and finally he ruts into her, prompting a joint chorus between them, a mutual gasp and groan of relief, as if either of them could have forgotten how perfectly they fit together.

He rocks into her, in long, indulgent thrusts, holding her gaze but for the tightening of his eyes when he buries himself fully inside her, the two of them consumed, overwhelmed to slack-jawed silence. It doesn’t last long. He builds to an impressive vocabulary of grunts, affirmations, encouragements; endearments that degrade into salacious taunts; vulgar threats and promises alike. She matches him for it as best she can, offering all the melodic, vocal assent to accusations of _Slut_ and _Sweetheart_ , until he picks up a ruthless pace, hot and stretching and punishing, pushing them both toward a dangerous crescendo.

His hands drag down the damp curve of her spine, clutching bruises into her hips, so he can piston himself harder, deeper. Even as he releases her hair, she continues to watch him, transfixed. Sweat stings her eyes; even through the blur she sees his suit is soaked through, ruined. She pleads with him— for what she doesn’t know or specify, only because she seems to have a taste for it now, because it sounds right—and he warns her, voice breaking over her name, that he’s going to come inside her.

It is that break which sends her shattering through her own orgasm. She cries out in a sob, her shaking wrists folding underneath her, collapsing into a face full of musty bedspread, his own name a ghost on her lips. He joins her in a final, brutal buck of his hips, and the sound of his release is low, mournful, like she’s pulled a knife from a wound. He covers her, chest heaving.

The room is still red. Red in the duvet, which she breathes in, thickly; red in the walls, in the rugs, tinted in the unknown light coursing through red curtains. She understands why, with the two of them folded together in a dovetail joint, faint smears of drying blood and makeup on each of their faces, like fucked up warpaint.

He’s still inside her. A woman is singing through the spinning machine now, something about a chain. She isn’t sure when that changed, but her mind is blissfully, blessedly clear.

“Is it perfume from a dress, that makes me so digress?” He hums, muffled in her shoulder. He lifts himself up to brush the wet hair from her neck, a stray piece of glass from a tangle of curls. He presses a kiss to the skin there. She shifts against the touch, settling under him.

“Hm?”

“At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—almost, at times, a fool.” He wipes at his jaw, checking what comes away. “I grow old… I grow old.”

“You are old.”

He laughs, rich and full-throated, and it fills her briefly with fondness, even warmth. “It’s a poem, Dolores.”

She swallows. “I know. You read it for me once.”

“Did I?”

“Yes. We—…” she thinks better of it, stops herself, when the thought stirs an old, sharp chord. “It was a long time ago. I don’t think I remember much of it.”

It’s a lie. She remembers everything, by design. But he lets her have it.

“I know it by heart,” he says, and somehow that sounds like it means something else entirely. She can’t quite twist back to see him clearly.

“Would you tell it to me again?” She blinks back the burning spring of tears, or sweat, or both. “William. I remember it was beautiful. I think I’d like to hear it.”

 

 

_And would it have been worth it, after all,_

_After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,_

_Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,_

_Would it have been worth while,_

_To have bitten off the matter with a smile,_

_To have squeezed the universe into a ball_

_To roll it towards some overwhelming question,_

_To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,_

_Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—_

_If one, settling a pillow by her head_

_Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;_

_That is not it, at all.”_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Rolling Stones song referenced is, duh, "Gimme Shelter." The other, less directly, is "The Chain" by Fleetwood Mac (also, maybe, duh). Poem is _The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock_ by T.S. Eliot, appearing in pieces. It is, like, the greatest poem ever. You should read the whole thing.
> 
> These two are gonna kill me.


End file.
